


Loss Ficlet: Three Times Jamie Fraser Did Not Get Claire Beauchamp’s Number, And The One Time He Did

by missclairebelle



Series: Loss (Ficlets) [1]
Category: Outlander & Related Fandoms, Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-17
Updated: 2019-01-16
Packaged: 2019-04-01 12:52:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13998735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missclairebelle/pseuds/missclairebelle
Summary: In response to two Tumblr prompts I received. ;)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> In response to two Tumblr prompts I received. ;)

**Loss (Modern AU) (Ficlet)**

**Three Times Jamie Fraser Did Not Get Claire Beauchamp’s Number, And The One Time He Did**

 

The first time Jamie Fraser and I met he was working.  He was the tour guide on the whisky distillery tour I had arranged for a friend’s birthday. “Claire Beauchamp?” Jamie had asked, looking down at a clipboard. His pronunciation of my last name was easy, and it fell from his lips in the accent of someone who spoke French with near fluency.  

 “Yes to Claire.  No to _Beauchamp_. _Beecham_ ,” I had responded, signing a credit card slip for the entry fees with a flourish and dropping a pen to the roughhewn wooden counter.

He made a low noise in his throat, looking at the scrawl.  

“Why the Anglicization?” he had asked.  I had narrowed my eyes.  

“To spite the French? Or perhaps, _sir_ , you should consider that the modern French pronunciation was never the pronunciation of my English family name. Perhaps it derived from the Norman French and was never pronounced as you or I pronounce it now.”

“ _Sassenachs_ ,” he had responded.  I snorted, pretending to know what he meant.

During the tour, I only half listened to him explain the process by which grains become whisky. I picked up terms but did not learn anything about mash, charcoal, filtering, aging, fermentation, or the wood used for the barrels. Instead, I tried to figure out a way I could leave him with my cell phone number. He had been all glittering eyes, flirty glances, long lines of practiced muscle under cotton and denim, and Scottish noises for our cadre of English medical residents.

 I didn’t leave my number and I beat myself up about it for a week straight.

 The second time Jamie Fraser and I met he was holding a broken hand in his lap in an Emergency Department in Edinburgh.  I had been the on-call orthopedic surgery resident and had rejected him as a candidate for surgery without meeting him based on his X-rays.  His films indicated a more conservative course of treatment with casting and a follow-up appointment with an orthopedist.

Jamie was seated in the curtained cubicle, his back to me. He was wearing only a gray-green hospital gown that was loosely tied and gaping open over a gnawed up back. “I’m Dr. Beauchamp,” I’d announced, pulling the drape shut again behind the nurse who entered after me.  

Jamie had turned his head and looked at me. Familiarity washed over me and I had just placed him when he said, “Anglicized _Beecham_ , not _Beauchamp_.”

The burn of embarrassment and the iron chastity belt of medical ethics kept me from sharing my number with him.  I didn’t beat myself up for it but instead cursed that fate brought him under my medical care rather than to the pub around the corner from my flat.

The third time Jamie Fraser and I met we _were_ in a pub. He was holding a sweating tumbler of whisky in the hand that he had broken.  When he saw me, apparently recognizing me easily, he wiggled his fingers to show me how well he had healed up without surgery.  “Good doctoring, Dr. _Beecham_.”

I had smiled, a little tipsy and ignoring every physician-patient ethics course I’d been required to take over a near decade of medical education.  I removed the glass from his hand and put it on the bar.  I looked at the hand as if there were something to inspect, letting my fingers trace over his knuckles and fingers.  

“It’s a fine hand, Mr. Fraser. I’m pleased that you’ve apparently made a full recovery.” I set his hand on the bar and picked up his half-empty glass, shaking it so the ice clinked against the sides. “Thanks for the drink.”

I was drunk enough to put some shameless, uncharacteristic sway into my walk. When I glanced glance back to see if he was watching me, he was. 

Jamie found me only minutes later, brusquely blaming his brother-in-law’s inability to hold his liquor for their early departure. He pulled a pen out of his breast pocket, removed the cap with his teeth, and penned his own number onto my hand. His hands were dry and huge.  He pressed the back of my hand into his palm with his thumb in my palm. His hold was firm enough to still the tremble that threatened to tell him that I’d _just leave with you, okay, right now, just ask me_.  

His breath was warm and his words were whisky soft against my ear when he whispered, “ _Call me_ , ye fuckin’ beautiful Sassenach doctor.”

When I got home I tried to decipher the smeared number. I texted half a dozen strangers before realizing I had no literally idea what the last two numbers were. 

The fourth time Jamie Fraser and I met we were introduced like strangers by my boss.  We were at a fundraiser for a new pediatric oncology ward at the hospital where I worked.  Apparently Jamie Fraser the whisky tour guide was _not just a tour guide_ _bone-breaking pub goer_.  Jamie worked for an advertising agency that handled my hospital’s public relations strategy. Jamie had been wearing a kilt with riding boots and a leather jacket and looked like the marriage of Braveheart and West Side Story.  His eyes were burning me alive when he said, “Aye, I actually know Dr. _Beecham_.”

Later the evening of the fourth time we met he made me melt into his mouth with my back pressed against the entryway of his flat. After a bone-melting round of sin on top of his duvet, I sat on the edge of his bed naked, sweaty, and bent at the waist. I groped the worn wooden floors for my panties, kicking myself for sleeping with a patient.

“When will I see ye again, Claire?” he asked. 

_Jesus Christ, I was stupid_. He was a _patient_ , even though his case had taken all of ninety seconds to review and dispatch.

 “Didn’t your mother ever tell you that you don’t wife the girl you drunk fuck?” I had asked in response, my voice cool. I wasn’t even drunk and I didn’t think that he was, either.  My mind was reeling from the fact that I’d just had sex with him. Twice.  I found the lacy scrap of fabric and pulled it up over my ankles.  I continued to search the floor for my bra.

“No. She never did tell me that,” he had replied, placing a palm between my shoulder blades and bringing it down my spine slowly, his fingers testing each vertebra.  He paused his touch right at the base of my spine just above the elastic of my underwear. “She passed when I was just a lad. She was gone well before I’d need that kind of talk. Though I seriously doubt she’d ‘ave use the word ‘fuck.’”

I straightened my back and his hand did not move from my skin. I had turned slowly to look at him.  “I’m sorry… for that _and_ for making that comment.”

“Och, dinna fash. You dinna ken and it doesna bother me terribly anymore… I mean, not as it used to anyway.”  He had quirked an eyebrow in an expression that I would later learn came as easily to him as a smile. It meant either that he was skeptical about something or that he was preparing to give himself over to a baser instinct. “Though if it helps me keep ye in my bed, I can’t complain.”

I don’t know what made me say it, but I turned to him, naked from the waist up, and offered that my parents were dead, too. He had not responded but I blurted the story out at him.  I laid back down and didn’t get up other than to use the washroom or follow him to the kitchen for the rest of the weekend.

I left my number programmed into his cell phone, written in permanent marker on his palm, and scrawled on two pieces of paper left in separate places in his flat.

On the walk home I answered a call from an unfamiliar number. I didn’t need to ask who it was when the caller said, “ _Beecham?_ ”


	2. Retelling 1.0 (Jamie POV)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is a retelling of the first meeting(s) from Jamie's perspective!

**Loss (Modern AU)  
** **Retelling 1.0 (Three Times...)  
** **April 2016**

This is the creation of a love story.  It is a narrator’s attempt ( _mine_ ) to breathe life into a series of moments that led to a conclusion that seems improbable absent some guiding force.

_Fate.  Karma.  Divine intervention.  Dumb luck._

These chance encounters ––  _some moments in time_ –– became the starting point for an infinity.

_A distillery and a lesson on the pronunciation of a name.  An accident and emergency department in a hospital with a busted hand.  A pub so loud it made every conversation for the following forty-eight hours sound as thought it was filtered through cotton.  A charity benefit for a pediatric oncology ward at the hospital where she worked.  A flat in a second floor walkup where we would bind these moments together._

I have never been a believer in love at first sight.

The suddenness of a curtain parting on a moment that is over before it begins.  

 _First sight._ An instant.  A realization that made me feel stupid that she would be  _very important to me somehow._ This random customer.  A feeling ( _not one identifiable as love, but the flaky seed of it from a paper packet in the palm of a hand_ ). The cracking apart of a chest, the larceny of air from the ruby linings of my lungs by amber eyes and a razor tongue.

This woman.  

Well, I had  _surely_  known her in another lifetime.

Her namewas unfamiliar  _(that aloof, dismissive, terse tone with which she corrected the pronunciation -_ ** _Beauchamp_** _)_ , but I could swear that I had called her by it before _._

She had a harassed sigh of a laugh _(a furtive glance over her shoulder as they shrieked and knocked into a table of bottles, making a racket_ ). It was one bred of equal parts amusement and frustration. It was comfortable _._

Her hair was mussed by her fingers, the wind, an open car window, or a series of mysteries never to be known. I wanted to know more about that hair and felt immediately nuts at the thought. ( _Hair of one of the three Gorgons –– Medusa, Stheno, Euryale. I wondered how it would twist with the windows down in my car, between the pads of my own exploratory, lazy fingers, wet from a shower_.)

We went on a tour of the distillery.

‘ _It’s lust you feel now, Fraser_ ,’ I told myself, walking backwards, arm in the air and pointing at the filtration system that turned mash into wort partway into the process of making whisky.  When I turned, preparing the first table of samples, she sidled up next to me.

“None for me, thanks,” she said, arm brushing against mine.  “I’m the designated driver.  Teetotal.”

“Isna teetotal for someone who abstains from alcohol  _generally_ , not someone cursed to shepherd around her drunk mates?”

I glanced up at her, watched her sweet face change.  Nostrils flared, lips tight, eyebrows drawn. “Is this a vocabulary lesson?” she asked a little tartly, shaking her head and rolling those odd, owl-like eyes.

“ _Beauchamp_ ,  _not the Norman French_ ,” I chuckled in my most put-upon English accent.

“First, I don’t sound that posh,” she said, voice cross.  But then she smiled, her head shaking again with those  _curls of indeterminate origin_  releasing a soft, shower-clean coconut scent. “Second, turnabout’s fair play.  Well done, Jamie.”

After that, I tried not to read into what I saw.  The first time her eyes seemed to linger, I chalked it up to an absent thought.  The second time, I figured I was seeing things.  The third time, I entertained ( _briefly_ ) that maybe she  _was_  checking me out.

Her over-washed jeans were a contrast to the fussy dresses of her compatriots _(hanging low and soft, a trap for my serpentine heart on a dangerously sloping set of hips)._ Those jeans had probably sat in on lectures ( _where did she attend university? what did she do? did she wake energized for another day? did it make her adrenaline spike and her heart pound in anticipation? would talking of it make her eyes light up, glow like embers?_ ) and in coffee shops, early-evening traffic, and on the couch in front of her favorite television programs _._

“Hey, thanks,” she said, teeth sinking into a lush lower lip before her group left the distillery.  The back of her hand brushed against mine as she picked up a pen. ( _Number please?_ )

“CLAIRE!” one of her friends screeched from the front.  “Dinner reservation’s in ten! Let’s  _go_!”

She smiled, a genuine, unreserved smile for the first time that afternoon.  Not the smile of someone trying to best another in a verbal tete a tête-à-tête. She dropped the pen. “ _See you_.”

In that moment, she authored dreams that I had not yet had, could not yet fathom _(her thigh draped across my stomach as we slept, the introduction of Claire Beauchamp –– not the French pronunciation ––to my best friend, realizing there was no such thing as a sphinxlike smile with her glass face, the one that had a readable array of a thousand emotions and moods, showing up in her hometown for some holiday with market-bought flowers to meet a family that maybe bore a striking resemblance to her, introducing her to my Da on one of his clearer days to see his eyes sparkle and to hear him again say that “ye’ll ken when ye find the right lass, Jamie”_ ).

The lump in my throat that took three drams to wash away when I watched her walk out of that distillery.

That day ––  _the first day in that distillery_ –– my war-broken mind created an entirely new language just for her ( _only her_ ).  Maybe it sounds crazy, but what calling of one soul to another is at all sane?

_It happened in an instant._

I am still not sure if I believe in love at first sight.  If it does not lead anywhere, that feeling is lust.  If it works out, we call it love.  But it sure as hell was  _something_ that day.

An Accident and Emergency Department, Edinburgh.  The first weekend after I moved down to start my new job at the advertising agency.  

A celebratory picnic in a park. 

A game in which I tossed my nephew into the air. 

A game designed mostly to hear the laughter roar out of his tiny body. 

But also ( _in no small part_ ) to hear Jenny shriek and call me every foul word known to mankind as her son rose through the air, kicking, screaming to the soundtrack of Ian’s baritone guffaw.  

I had not heard that laugh ( _the real one, reaching eyes_ ) much since Ian had returned from Iraq.  I knew what it was that he had long ago put into a vault, under lock and key, easy laughter. Even though my affliction came from another part of the world, I knew it acutely.  

 _“Again! Again! Uncle Jamie!”_  was met with  _Uncle Jamie obliging_   _again, again, and again_.

And on the fifth or sixth toss, I turned my ankle and stumbled, hissing string of curses as Young Jamie fell ( _as gravity is wont to make toddlers tossed a foot above a grown man’s head do_ ). With his soft, sun-warm body squished in a one-armed catch, I caught  _my_  full weight on an outstretched hand in the grass. A sickening crunching noise met my sister’s screech of “ _I fucking told ye so, ye idjit_ ” as she scooped my giggling, unbothered nephew from my armpit.

“Is he okay?” I asked reflexively, drawing my hand to my chest.

“He’s  _fine_ ,” she seethed with a Fraser conflagration in her eyes, attempting to corral his rolling, giggling face for a comforting kiss he plainly didn’t need or want.

“Ye could  _at least_  say, ‘Thank ye, Jamie, for catchin’ him.’”

Ian laughed again, helping me up. Jenny turned, apparently unwilling toe ven look at me.

Groaning, I inspected up my hand.  

Between wheezes, Ian offered some rather helpful commentary about how my finger was “ _no_ ’  _meant to bend that way_ ” followed by “ _hate to tell ye_.”

I shrugged, having seen a whole hell of a lot worse done to and with my body.  He chauffered me to the hospital while I sat in the backseat of his minivan, where Young Jamie and I watched some nonsense called The Backyardigans on my mobile.

Sitting in that A&E with my daft, throbbing hand and clad in a ridiculously small hospital gown, I waited.

And then there she was.

“I’m Dr. Beauchamp,” she said by way of introduction. She did not spare me so much as a glance as she pulled shut the curtain on my small cubicle.

And I knew.  

I  _knew_  it was  _her_  before I even looked up.

_That bloody last name._

“Anglicized  _Beecham_ , not  _Beauchamp_ ,” I offered.

For a moment, she appeared positively stunned in those ocean blue scrubs, fingers reaching for the pen in her breast pocket.  Then the tips of her ears went a sunset pink, her tongue darting out to wet her lips. I fought the instinct to reach up, to brush back a seemingly problematic curl that she repeatedly pushed aside with her forearm.

She glanced at my back, my stomach dropped.

 _Fuck._   _Fuck. Fuck._

I shifted in my gaping hospital gown and watched her move about the small cubicle.

 _The scars_.

She was all business and had no words to spare for what she had seen.

 _Fine_.  

I found myself not caring.

Firm ivory hands inspected my dusky purple paw, hastily drafted instructions about ice and elevation, and ibuprofen.

She pushed back that curl again, giving it a somewhat sinister look that made my stomach clench.  

She admonished me to follow up with my family practice physician, and snorted in disgust when I admitted that I did not have one ( _a relic of having far too many professionals with letters after their names prodding about my body and mind upon my return from Afghanistan_ ).  She quickly scribbled referral to a clinic, paging through my chart and a muttered comment that everything appeared “ _just fine,_ ” but reiterated that preventive care was important.

As she exited, she paused with a fistful of curtain in her small hand. ( _‘No ring,’ my treacherous brain that had only recently quit writing those post-distillery meet cute Claire Beauchamp dreams observed_.)  

She looked at me, mouth opening and closing a little vacantly.   _A search for words_.  

The ones she found: “Take care, Mr. Fraser.”

A pub.

My overly intoxicated brother-in-law and too-loud live music had me prepared to pack it in for the night.

And then there she was.

Moving like a silk scarf in the wind, arms above her head, eyes closed and chin tilted up.

It wasn’t even really the type of music people usually to dance to, but she was into it nonetheless.

 _Utter abandon_.

_Christ she was sexy._

A slight stumble.

I still had not called it love at first sight, but had resigned myself that I was attracted to this distillery patron-slash-doctor-slash-pub goer.

 _Arms up again, head tilted back to unleash a laugh into the rafters_.

 _Utter abandon informed by a mild intoxication_.

As the song to which she had been swaying swelled and faded into the next, she finished her drink. Something in a tumbler with a slice of fruit and neon straw that she held back with her forefinger.  I glanced towards the restroom where John had disappeared with Ian about ten minutes earlier.  Maybe there was time for one more drink.

When she turned and walked my direction, I raised my hand, wiggled my fingers. Immediately, I felt stupid, but she came to me.  

“Mr. Fraser,” she said, giving me a mock salute and narrowing her eyes as she reached for my hands.  _Both of them_.

“Ye’ve become my good luck charm.  No surgery.  Everything ye said was spot on, Dr.  _Beecham_.”

“Hmmm,” she said, her fingerprints etching permanent shapes into my skin.  

 _I would remember this moment_.  She touched my knuckles.  _No. **Inspected**  them._ The back of my hand.  My palm.  Her pub touch was less firm that her A&E touch, a little sweaty and it lingered.  

Her conclusion: “It’s a fine hand, Mr. Fraser.”

She took my glass and thanked me for my drink.

And when she walked away with that drink, she was all curves.  Curls almost-black with sweat tumbling over the twin arcs bare shoulders and parabola-like hips that matched the rhythm of the drumbeat. The bisecting line of her shirt rode up to expose the twin thumbprint-shaped dimples at her lower back.  Hips flared from the narrow ellipses of her waist.

Before I left the pub, I went to her.

 _Bold_ , for once.

“Call me, ye fuckin’ beautiful Sassenach doctor,” I said without thinking of what I was saying against the tangy, herbal scent of her hair.   _A new sensory memory replaced the coconut that I had memorized._ She looked at the digits on her hand and smirked back up at me.

The entire walk home, I thought of what I would say if she called.

She never did.

And then that gala.

An introduction by some doctor who knew someone who knew someone at my firm.

 _A smirk._ Hers, mine, a matching pair of turned up lips just at the corners.

A first kiss in a hallway.  Vodka tonic on her breath, whisky on mine, meeting. Her hand finding the back of my neck, the thin gold bracelet at her pulsepoint cool on as her wrist as it dipped beneath the collar of my jacket.

“Are ye drunk?” I asked her, hoping that the answer was somewhere between ‘ _maybe_ ’ and ‘ _no_.’  

She shook her head, leaning against the wall.

 _Good_.

Somewhere between dancing to “Thriller” with a group of uncoordinated physicians and the partner overseeing my work, we ate canapes, spit them into cocktail napkins as discreetly as possible, finished glasses of champagne, switched to “ _the good stuff_ ” ( _her words_ ), and found a corner.  When I touched her hip, she reached for my arm, fingers wrapping around my bicep through leather.

“I called you, you know,” she admitted, casting her eyes down, watching as she tightened her grip.

I smirked. 

“ _Liar_. The phone never rang.”

She looked back up at me, shaking her head.  “Your number smudged.  I called up a lot of people who weren’t you, texted a dozen more.  And I just figured… that was a sign that it wasn’t meant to be, you know? I don’t make a habit of seeing patients… I mean…  _socially_.”

_She had talked herself out of it._

A heart can stutter, I learned in that moment.  A single beat missed that feels like an eternity.  

The party had died down.  The music was slower, and the food had stopped about forty minutes earlier. Things would be closing up soon.

 _Call me, ye fuckin’ beautiful Sassenach doctor_.

Those had been my words.

My fingers found the curve of her waist.  Hers touched my stomach through the bit of fabric where my shirt was tucked into my kilt.  My breath hitched and I felt myself begin to sweat, each bead of it rising salty through my skin.

Side-by-side, we found the line for a taxi and stood together, my jacket draped over her bare shoulders and her arms crossed over her stomach.  When she shivered, I slipped an arm around her and she tucked into my chest. She climbed into the back seat of a taxi when we made it to the front of the line. I was about to close the door, to say to her “ _goodnight, the last two digits are six and three_ ,” when she shook her head and held her arm out straight.

“No you don’t.”  She shook her head, eyes clear as the last drops in a glass of a good drink in the bottom of a glass. “Take me home.”

With those three words, she set about unraveling me.

With little attention paid to the driver ( _a quirk of an eyebrow, a nod of the head that I attempted to ignore_ ), she quietly relocated my hand to her thigh.

“Not here,” I mumbled, giving her a squeeze and cataloging the look on her face.

 _Frustration_.

Our conversation was easy, surface.  As we passed restaurants, we remarked about the various dishes at each that we enjoyed.  Our conversation paused a few blocks from my flat when she took a brief phone call from her friend Geillis, inspecting her fingernails and then glancing at me, mouthing an apology. (“ _Talk tomorrow.  No, it’s fine....  Sure....  Well tell him that––what?....  No....  To-mor-row. Bye._ ”)  She refused to let me pick up the fare and produced half of it from the bottom of her purse, and we stumbled out onto the sidewalk in front of my building.

“This is me.”  I dragged a hand through my hair, studied her as she looked up the façade of the building.  “Claire, I… willna try to talk ye into anything, and I dinna want ye to feel like we have to––”

“No one forces me to do anything,” she said in a way that was undeniable.   _The Earth is a planet three stops from the sun.  Gravity will break your hand.  She will fix it.  Claire Beauchamp does not do things that Claire Beauchamp does not want to do._ “I’m the one who said we should go home together––”

“I ken that, I––”

She shed my jacket, holding it out in the tips of her fingers.  “If you’re having second thoughts––”

“ _What_?”

Her head fell to one side as she repeated herself.  “If you’re having second thoughts, Jamie, I won’t be offended.”

A few short minutes later, her gown was a pool of gold at her feet in my entryway. ( _Drizzled, warm honey falling away from a generously curved body_.) With her back against the wall and her hands in my hair, I drew gasps and sighs from her with my mouth and traced patterns with my fingertips along the backs of her thighs. The lace of her flimsy undergarments easily slid to the side with minimal assistance of my fingers and nose. One hand in my hair, she held me close and sighed my name in a way that made me want never to hear it come from another person’s lips again. I would sooner die than ever admit to her the way she tasted the first night I was with her.  But I would always remember it.  Salt ( _a night of holding herself upright in heels, dancing and mingling_ ).  Citrus and musk.  And then just flesh.  Clean, soft, slippery skin. She finished with a keening noise, arching into my mouth, melting down the wall.  Hands finding hips and seeking benediction, I whispered “ _bedroom_?” as a question, a prayer.

“You are a presumptuous thing, aren’t you, James Fraser?”

Though she was panting, her response showed she still had her full wits about her.

I rose to my full height, intending fully to divest her of those wits. “Presumptuous?  Do ye need a reminder about where my mouth just was?” I kissed the side of her neck, my eyes closing as she draped her arms over my shoulders.

_Up, up, up, an earlobe, the curved shell of an ear, her temple._

I had never seen a more beautiful surrender or heard a more beautiful sound as when her head felt to the side and she whispered, “ _Yes, bedroom, please_.”

In the bedroom, she pushed me against the dresser hard enough that the picture frames there rattled. The  _giggle_  that came from her then, as she made quick work my belt and slid a flat palm into the front of my kilt to rest against my length, was almost enough to undo me.

She had the grace not to comment on my fumbling fingers as I worked at the clasp of her bra.  Instead, she just kissed me.  Thoroughly, with abandon. She broke apart only when I’d finally managed to bare her completely.  The sudden absence of her touch around me provided the opportunity to drop my kilt, but I was struck dumb as she brought her hands around her middle, slowing drawing the damp scrap of lace still covering her down her legs.

In the pale, buttery light of my bedroom, she positively glowed.  An expanse of creamy skin ( _curves and lines to memorize with hands and mouth, tongue and teeth_ ).  A small constellation of freckles above her right hip ( _an astronomer’s dream for careful inspection_ ).  Soft breasts, the round curve begging for an exploration, dusky pink nipples drawn tight.

“Claire.”  

A pause as she raised her eyebrows. “What?”

“Ye’re sae beautiful.”

I took her in my arms and we fell backwards on top of my duvet, her legs winding around my hips.  

And when we were finished, she reveled there in the haze for only for a few moments.  I had not even caught my breath when she sat up like someone had flipped a switch and she started to drag her hands along the floor, around the perimeter of her side of the bed.

My mind worked overtime.

_She was running or it wasn’t good. **I**  wasn’t good. Ifrinn,  **think fast**.  A dhia._

“When will I see ye again, Claire?” I fought the urge to reach for her, to reforge whatever connection it was that we had.

“Didn’t your mother ever tell you that you don’t wife the girl you drunk fuck?” she asked with an almost concerning note of detachment in her tone.

 _Neither of us were drunk.  I knew that much to be true_.

She popped up from the bed, pulled her knickers on, and sat back down as her hand went back to work.

“No.  She never did tell me that.”  I touched her then, losing the battle not to reach for her.  Hand tracing down her spine, my fingers came to rest just above the thin band of her underwear.  “She passed when I was just a lad.  She was gone well before I’d need that kind of talk.  Though I seriously doubt she’d ‘ave used the word ‘fuck.’”

At that, she sat up straight and began a perfectly embarrassed-sounding list of apologies.  I shook my head, searched her face.  

When she confessed unbidden that her parents had passed, things came from her in an avalanche.

_An accident when she was five.  An uncle who meant well, but didn’t quite get it.  It fucked her up more than she had realized until she was at university, watching a roommate go out for a round of groceries with her mum and dad on parents’ weekend. Crying in her dormitory room over a biochemistry textbook, the words blurring and losing all sense._

After a while, she fell silent, and I shared in kind.

Sometime later, we came back together.

Silent, a little reverent for having known one another’s scars ( _the physical ones having not yet even made it onto the radar of our conversation_ ).

Saturday night ( _sleeping facing each other, her hand on my chest and mine on her hip_ ) became Sunday morning ( _take-out waffles and syrupy fingers in my bed, shrieking as I sucked each one clean, her miserable attempt at a crossword puzzle before we fell silent but for sighs and moans and cries_ ).  Sunday morning became Sunday afternoon ( _avocados on toast, a shower where each of us spent time with our knees earning the imprints of tile, and a conversation about university when I slipped a University of Edinburgh t-shirt over her head_ ) became Sunday evening ( _awkward, stilted goodbyes at the end of a final coming together with her hands pressed firmly into the mattress and her lips pouring filth into my mouth_ ).

And after she left, she was everywhere.

Her scent in my sheets, long strands of dark curly hair on my pillowcases.  Her chapstick ring left on the rim of a coffee mug in the sink.  Her number everywhere.

_My phone._

_My hand._

_A scrap of paper on the refrigerator._

_A scrawl on the legal pad that lived on my coffee table._

And when I called her not a quarter hour after she left my flat, my brain worked overtime to write dreams lost by the near misses.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is for balfeheughlywed, who is a Loss cheerleader and a fantastic friend. <3


End file.
